French apartment renovations, Day 210: Ceiling drywall, sleepovers, and migrating bread

8,874 steps

It's hot! I went to bed hot, woke up hot, and stayed hot except for a brief interlude in the ocean in the afternoon. Still doable but the heat presses in from all directions.

We got two sheets of acoustic drywall hung on the ceiling this morning. "Only two?" you might ask. Well, remember that we're installing this on a ceiling that isn't level, flat, straight, or square--anywhere. One side has to tuck inside the great big load-bearing beam, but of course the beam itself isn't even so some places stick out more than others. With 2 kids, 2 adults, lots of trimming and re-trimming, and many shims, we got the first two sheets in place.

Zari was terrified she was going to drop the drywall on her head. It's heavy--far heavier than normal drywall. But we did okay.

We have to accept that we will never have flat or straight ceilings in this apartment and just do the best we can.

With some of the leftover MAP (which we'd used for a bit of extra reinforcement on top of using screws), we sealed in some of the electrical cables in the downstairs WC.

I stayed for a while in the afternoon shaving down one of the joists that is sticking out far beyond the others. It's about 2/3 done. What a pain. It has to be done bit by bit with a chisel.

Ivy left this afternoon for a sleepover. She overpacked by several outfits and underwear changes. I didn't want to stamp out her excitement so I just kept adding things to her backpack. She'll be up in the "arriere pays" with two other friends.

We couldn't get Dio or Inga to come to the beach. Oh well--it was magnificent. Their loss.

Zari helped me go grocery shopping and carry home 160 Euros of groceries. Keeping our family supplied with food is its own job!

I made bread for the first time in a long while. It's getting too hot for baking bread. One of my loaves slid off the edge of the baking stone and plopped onto the bottom of the oven. Then it kept on baking down there. So we had a very interesting looking loaf of bread, with the bottom bit on the baking stone, a very burned bit that had baked in place on its way down, and then a weird lumpy loaf on the bottom that I had to scrape off with a long wooden spoon, trying not to burn myself in the process.